Split at Section - What's the Rationale

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I didn’t see anyone ask/mention this (although I’ll admit that I didn’t make it through all 466 search matches on “split at section”).

Think in the context of Scrivenning. I have a tree structure like:

  • A[list][*]B
  • C
    [/*:m][/list:u]

When I view this in Scrivening mode, it comes out:

A
B
C

If I split A into A1 and A2, the tree updates:

  • A1[list][*]B
  • C
    [/:m][]A2[/*:m][/list:u]

And the text updates

A1
B
C
A2

It seems to me that the desired result is normally:

A1
A2
B
C

Obviously, splitting has this effect because the sub-items stay with A1. Is there a compelling reason why this is the case? It seems to me that my goal is maintain the flow of text when I split. If the children were transferred to the second item, ordering would be preserved. There are other approaches that also preserve order (make A2 the first child of A1) but don’t seem to make sense in the greater scheme of things.

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I’ll also echo the hope that you resolve the “metadata doesn’t copy” known bug because it’s another aspect of what seems to “make sense”.

2

Thanks for this note, your intuitions are indeed correct; I have created a ticket for this. The expected behaviour is for any content split off of the container to be inserted at the top of the list of children, since in a flat output of text, the action of splitting would make no change at all to the flow of the words. Split shouldn’t alter the flow, merely add more detail for you to work with in the outline.

3

You might be happy to know, that this bug will be fixed with the next release.